Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich

by Richard A. Etlin (Editor)

Overview

Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich explores the ways in which the Nazis used art and media to portray their country as the champion of Kultur and civilization. Rather than focusing strictly on the role of the arts in state-supported propaganda, this volume contributes to Holocaust studies by revealing how multiple domains of cultural activity served to conceptually dehumanize Jews and other groups.

Contributors address nearly every facet of the arts and mass media under the Third Reich--efforts to define degenerate music and art; the promotion of race hatred through film and public assemblies; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; race as portrayed in popular literature; the reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest, and appeasement. Familiar subjects such as the Munich Accord, Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, and Lebensraum (Living Space) are considered from a new perspective. Anyone studying the history of Nazi Germany or the role of the arts in nationalist projects will benefit from this book.

Contributors:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
David Culbert
Albrecht Dümling
Richard A. Etlin
Karen A. Fiss
Keith Holz
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Paul B. Jaskot
Karen Koehler
Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien
Jonathan Petropoulos
Robert Jan van Pelt
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Gröning

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226220871
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/15/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	406
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Richard A. Etlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Maryland. He is the author of five books, most recently In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters and Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Editor's Acknowledgments
Editor's Note
Introduction: The Perverse Logic of Nazi Thought
Richard A. Etlin
I. Weltanschauung
1. The Target of Racial Purity: The "Degenerate Music" Exhibition in Dusseldorf, 1938
Albrecht Dumling
2. The National Socialist Garden and Landscape Ideal: Bodenstandigkeit (Rootedness in the Soil)
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Groning
3. Bearers of Culture, Harbingers of Destruction: The Mythos of the Germans in the East
Robert Jan van Pelt
II. Propaganda
4. The Impact of Anti-Semitic Film Propaganda on German Audiences: Jew Suss and The Wandering Jew (1940)
David Culbert
5. The Celluloid War: Packaging War for Sale in Nazi Home-Front Films
Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien
6. The Drama of Illumination: Visions of Community from Wilhelmine to Nazi Germany
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
III. Empire-Building
7. From Seduction to Denial: Arno Breker's Engagement with National Socialism
Jonathan Petropoulos
8. Heinrich Himmler and the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds: The Interest of the SS in the German Building Economy
Paul B. Jaskot
9. Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
IV. Appeasement
10. The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938
Karen Koehler
11. In Hitler's Salon: The German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale
Karen A. Fiss
12. The Exiled Artists from Nazi Germany and Their Art
Keith Holz
List of Contributors
Index